My hypothesis is that it's people not cooking their own meals. I call it the Two-income Diet (or Elizabeth Warren Diet, if I want to impress people). Fallacy #

My hypothesis is that it's people not cooking their own meals. I call it the Two-income Diet (or Elizabeth Warren Diet, if I want to impress people). Fallacy #1: America has shitty food. America had god-tier shitty food in the 70s and 80s, to the points where immigrants here with means baked their own bread and everything because it was so bad. Fast forward to the 80s and 90s and you had the beginnings of the farmers markets across the west coast, and now you can buy high quality food for not that much money. Sure, people eat badly, but people don't realize how shitty food used to be. If American food was so much worse then, one would expect people to have been fatter. Fallacy #2: It's all about portion size. Portion sizes are large, yes, but they were already big. I remember going to Red Robin in the 90s in high school and having eating competitions, and even then our champions could only do 20 or so coke refills and 5 burgers. Fallacy #3: Americans don't know how to cook now. This assumes Americans knew how to cook at some point in the past. Not true. Besides horrific ingredients, people were literally just tossing together cans of shit when my mother moved to the US, much to her horror. My hypothesis: People don't prepare their own food. I don't have any data for this, but I think that people are basically not preparing their own food. No matter how bad the shit in can is, it's better than the same shit plus 20mg sodium plus 4 tsp butter in a restaurant. And takeout food looks even worse, literally swimming in oil. Or at a fast food place. Furthermore, I bet that one could directly tie this into the 1) entry of women in the workforce and 2) more people living alone, where there is less time to prepare a meal that even in the worst case is twice as healthy as prepared food from an external source.